Press Advisory, International Rivers Network
June 3, 2006
Scandal further Discredits Wall Street Financed Project A group of 53 Chinese senior engineers and academics has made an urgent appeal to China’s leaders to rethink plans for the Three Gorges Dam. The petition warns that filling the reservoir as planned could have dire consequences for hundreds of thousands of people living in the Three Gorges area and for navigation along the Yangtze River. The petition was submitted on March 3rd, 2000. About one-third of the signatories are former members of the Chinese People‚Äôs Political Consultative Conference, the official political advisory body to the state government. The petition, written by Lu Qinkan, a leading hydrologist who worked on the dam’s original feasibility study, calls for a return to the original plan of delaying reservoir filling so that experts would have time to monitor sediment buildup and to determine if higher water levels are viable. This would also provide some relief for resettlement authorities, the experts argue, who are faced with the costly and difficult task of resettling up to 1.8 million people out of the Three Gorges region. Maintaining the Three Gorges reservoir at 156 meters would reduce the number of people who have to be moved by an estimated 520,000.